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A. Brooks
(1843 - 1864)
Home State: Connecticut
Branch of Service: Infantry
Unit: 8th Connecticut Infantry
Before Antietam
His father died when he was 2 years old and he was orphaned in 1857 at his mother's death. In 1860 he was a 16 year old machinist living with his half-sister Emily and her husband S. Clayton Kingman in Bridgeport, CT. On 26 November 1861 he enlisted in Annapolis, MD as a Private in Company A, 8th Connecticut Infantry and he was promoted to Corporal on 28 March 1862.
On the Campaign
He was with his Company at Antietam and was promoted to Sergeant there on 17 September 1862. Writing about it later, he said:
We left here [Fredericksburg, VA] about 3 months ago, many poor fellows left with us who now are beneath the ground on the battlefield of Antietam. I have seen what it is to die a soldier’s death, and to be laid in a soldier’s grave.
Only one from my tent was killed, the most lighthearted and thoughtless in the company. We have missed his laugh and joke, but he is gone. The boom of the cannon, the crack of the rifle, will not awake him.
The rest of the War
He was appointed First Sergeant on 25 September 1862 and re-enlisted on 24 December 1863. He was mortally wounded at Cold Harbor, VA, on 2 June 1864 and died in a field hospital the next day.
He was a thoroughly exemplary man, and was studying for the ministry when the war broke out. He promptly enlisted as a private, and re-enlisted as a veteran; reading the Greek testament and studying Hebrew in the leisure of his service. He was widely lamented.
References & notes
His service basics from Ingersoll.1 Personal details from family genealogists, the US Census of 1860, and his bio sketch in William A. Liska and Kim L. Perlotto's The Eighth Connecticut Volunteer Infantry in the Civil War (2022). The quote about his studying for the ministry from Croffut & Morris.2 Further details from Dave Hann, who kindly supplied Brooks' photograph from his collection. His gravesite is on Findagrave. Thanks to Linda Zimmerman for the poke to look further into Brooks, for corrections to his birthplace and circumstances of his death, and for his thoughts on Antietam, from a letter of November 1862 from Fredericksburg.
More on the Web
Albion's wartime letters, a source of some of the details here and the Antietam quote, are among the Albion Brooks and Kingman family Civil War letters and related materials in the Eberly Family Special Collections Library Repository, Penn State University [finding aid].
Birth
05/09/1843; Carthage, ME
Death
06/03/1864; Cold Harbor, VA; burial in Riverside Cemetery, Kingfield, ME
1 Ingersoll, Colin Macrae, Adjutant-General, Catalogue of Connecticut Volunteer Organizations in the Service of the United States, 1861-1865, Hartford: Brown & Gross, 1869, pg. 364 [AotW citation 5691]
2 Croffut, W. A., and John M. Morris, The Military and Civil History of Connecticut during the War of 1861-65, New York: Ledyard Bill, 1868, p. 597 [AotW citation 30460]